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As tech workers, we enjoy the libations of a free market working somewhat close to its ideal, except when it doesn't.

The industry colludes to depress our wages as a whole (Apple/Google anti-poaching agreement and outsourcing). The industry lobbies to enact legislation that brings our wages down (H1B). The entire system tries to prevent unionization through legislation.

If we look at industries that haven't experienced our continued boom, we can see what the future has in store for us as a whole. Depressed wages that haven't increased, decreased to no benefits and a transition from salaried employee to contract work, jobs dissolved by automation and not many options for finding work.

We need a front to negotiate with the industry as whole as we are already on the chopping block.

A union negotiates a contract with an employer. The employer freely enters that contract, and by signing that contract is giving the written intention of following through with that contract.

That contract is mutually beneficial. As employer, you are provided with a pool of selected professionals. As a worker, you are provided with fairer compensation and benefits.

Right to work comes in and says those contracts do not have to be honored by the employer and they can break that contract because the law says so. Anyone they employ now enjoys the benefits of that the union spent time and money on negotiating, but the worker does not have to pay dues to enjoy that privilege. Without the union, those privileges wouldn't exist.

Any "rational actor" can see that the rational decision is to enjoy the benefits a union brings to the table, without having to pay dues.

The counter to this is the argument of freedom of association, saying employers can hire who they want. This sidesteps the fact that employers made the free decision to entire such contracts and chose to stand by its stipulations.

Unions do not hold a monopoly on workers. Workers are free to entire and exit contracts with unions or negotiate on their lonesome. Employers have a variety of unions and individuals to pick their employees from.

You're missing the point. When you are an individual negotiating with a well-lawyered, well-moneyed organization who holds power (your ability to make a living) over you, that is not a negotiation. It is reminiscent of Hobson's choice.

A negotiation happens when both sides have a fairer footing in terms of what they have to offer and lose.

When a union goes to negotiate with a corporation, their relationship is on an equal footing. This allows for better negotiations in terms of compensation, working conditions, benefits and what not.

It is the check and balance that the inequal relationship between a sole worker and a corporation needs.

A union is a corporation for laborers. When you are a lone skilled worker negotiating with a company, the cards are in their hands every time. You are replaceable.

Divide and conquer works great if you want to depress the earnings of entire industries.

As professionals, we need to recognize that we are being given the shaft as a whole and unless we have some solidarity, negotiating truly fair market rate compensation is a pipe dream.

Right to work and its ilk have a very expressed intention of neutering unionization efforts.

Keep in mind, that with a proper front for labor to negotiate with firms, compensation is kept at a fair market level.

We haven't seen compensation increases in most occupations in 30 years.

You, as a worker, are owed a much larger compensation that should be what the market would bear if you were able to negotiate on a much fairer plane with your employer.

As IT workers, we are a huge revenue drain compared to other workers on the books, despite any claims to how much 'worth' we might bring to a company. Ideally, for them, those wages will go down. The industry has shown time and again that it will defy the law to keep our pay low and below its true market value.

Awesome and good luck : )

Try to think of how and why you'll extract a profit from users, potential investors will want to know your plan after growth.

Made this so I could quickly capture a demo screenshot when pushing updates to my applications. To do that, you need to get the Window ID from Quartz to capture a specific window.

Hope this makes some dev's life a bit easier by doing that automatically for you.

The solution to torturing people is total surveillance. It's scary that there are people that think like this.

Sure hope the OP is in the correct location and has the correct religion, ethnicity and associations for this to be true.

That's a nice belief, but evidence shows people choose junk food because of availability, price, associated preparation time and a lack of nutritional education.

The further down the income ladder you go the more those factors come into play rather than the simplistic "it tastes good" conclusion.

Welcome to The Cloud

"My next phone is going to be an Android that enables me to completely replace its firmware binary."

Component firmware and device drivers will still be binary blobs. You need to go a level deeper than that.

Not a peep was made while the intelligence community got in bed with tech companies. It was mutually beneficial and still is.

The only reason you're hearing about this is because it's good PR for Apple, after their intimate relations with the security apparatus were exposed.

And then you have a few dozen small radios screaming, "Hey I'm over here" and a greater chance of being recorded when setting them up.

Stuxnet was a complicated maneuver that was directed at Iranian civilian facilities and wasn't retaliatory or relatable to the layman at all.

The reveal of Stuxnet was before the reveal of the reach our surveillance apparatus has. The narrative was one of plausible deniability and a nod to the fact that nations were engaging in offensive online attacks.

The NK hack was an attack on American culture and values. It was symbolic in a way that attacking Iranian civilian nuclear power plants isn't. It also doesn't involve exposing and admitting to running offensive campaigns on civilians of countries we aren't at war with.

NK hack says that we need cyber defense front, since the internet is the new land bridge across the Atlantic and Pacific for anti-American extremists to attack us directly.

It fits the narrative that the measures we are taking regarding near total electronic surveillance are justified and warranted. It also is a call for more funding and power to the agencies that are engaging in the activities.

The US has built a narrative to justify their surveillance apparatus after getting caught with their pants down spying on the American people and the world.

It's an extension of the national security narrative. Agencies recognize the massive amount of funding and legislature on the horizon and want to see it diverted to them like it was to the DHS in the last decade.

Except it's a beacon that screams "Hey I'm over here" to everyone in a 90m radius.

Doesn't matter if it's fact if it creates a nice narrative for increasing and securing funds and power.

Hey, remember that saying about ignoring the trolls? Forget it, let's double down until some idiot does something really stupid and we have to move.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding about what the GPL license embodies, the harms it intends to mitigate and the motivations behind using such a license as a opposed to the BSD or MIT license which capture your less nuanced sentiment.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

Again, it's different when we do it. Especially when we think we have nothing to hide.

We heard cries about how bad things were on the other side of the Iron Curtain, while we led a witch-hunt on our own people.

When the commies spied on themselves people for The Greater Good, it was evil; but when we spy on ourselves for Freedom and Advertising, it is different.

Honestly, if you have enough money to not be part of some messy and suspective underclass, why would you give a shit? If you actually cared, you have enough money to subvert a dragnet or the consequences that might arise from it.

You can live in the Manhattan/SF superclass bubble or any other bubble around the world. You'll be spied on just as much here as anywhere. At home, you probably know someone in intelligence who can give you some good insider info, though.

It's different when we do it.

There were and are many people calling it for what it is. Defenders of the bill would sometimes respond sarcastically with what they thought was hyperbole.

The reveal about warrantless wiretaps slowly encroached on their retorts, but the FISA courts, NSLs and the mass collection of everyone's communications and whereabouts is really when we came full circle.

Somehow, national security is contingent on knowing EVERYTHING the public says and does. Total war has gone digital.

I never thought I'd see the day where a sarcastic slippery slope argument about the Patriot Act made in 2004 would manifest into our reality.

Same parallels can be drawn for western powers. Counterterrorism is the raison du jour for expanding and securing power. See what we've done and continue to do to the free press when it concerns our military affairs or national security. See the firewalls western countries are building that rival the Great Firewall.

I can't wait for my dishwasher to report back to KitchenAid about its usage + the sights and sound it picks up while idle.

The point is that it's already drafted and enacted by the time its made public and there is not much that can be done after being signed.

It doesn't matter that the public knows at that point. It will have been enacted and no heads will roll.

The transformation of the already morally culpable role of confidential informant to morally abhorrent confidential provocateur is one that many agencies are forcing upon the useful yet to be convicts.

It is the case the grandparent is referencing with IE bundling in Windows. It reapplies the antitrust laws to monopolies selling bits. If Google is found to have a monopoly in market X and uses that control to gain control of market Y by forcing out competitors without really competing, that is the type of monopoly that's being targeted. This is what the grandparent is talking about. It is different from a simple monopoly the parent refers to.

Having a monopoly isn't illegal. Abusing or attaining the status in certain ways are. Walled gardens can certainly be considered a form of monopoly, but that means nothing in the eyes of the law unless they use abuse their monopoly status.

Nexus 7 doesn't even have the default Browser application installed. It's Chrome and only Chrome.